_ THE NEW YORKER where she pointed with pride to a big sink, a modern stove, and a capacious re- frigerator. "Does the refrigerator come with the house?" the urban lady asked. "Oh, my goodness, you've come to the wrong place! " the housewife said. "It's the house next door that's for rent. I'm after a maid. I thought you were a little choosy, but you can't tell these days, can you?" Breath of Life I N Lord & Taylor's window, there's a wax figure of a little boy asleep in bed, dreaming, and, by George, he's breathing! -inhale, exhale, inhale, ex- hale. Tracking down what seemed to be a new tendency in the plastic arts, we wound up in Jersey City, in the studio of an old gentleman named Leopold Schmidt, who devised the breathing ef- fect and made the mannequin. Breath- ing mannequins are far from new, Mr. Schmidt told us; he did a breathing mannequin for Bloomingdale's in 1923 and before that he did another for a mat- " Th h o c." tress concern. at was a toug Ie, he recalled. "The thing would shiver all over and it took me three weeks to get it working right. I used to get the creeps when I was working on it late at night." It is hard to place Mr. Schmidt, but we will call him a sculptor with me- chanical overtones. His uncle did wax sculpture for the Eden Musée and his father was a sculptor. At the age Df twenty- fi ve, having learned the wax- museum game from his uncle, he went into business for him- self, making portrait figures and commercial exhibits. "The first bust I ever did was of Jesus Christ, and then I did one of the president of the Standard Oil Company," he told us. He wanted us to un- derstand that Lord & Taylor's Mr. Callahan was responsible for the idea behind this display. "The dreams and stuff were all Mr. Callahan's. I was mere- ly responsible for the breath- ing," he said. Mr. Schmidt is happiest do- ing museum work. His favor- ite creation was a tableau of George Vv' ashington and Betsy Ross pondering designs for the American flag. "I also did one of Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams looking at the Declaration of Independence," he said. "They are looking at it, not crit- icizing or anything, just looking at it." He also did a wax version of the Last Supper. "That's by Leonardo da VincI. I stuck to his ideas pretty closely," he remarked. Some department-store jobs are complicated by the fact that the strong lights necessary in the windows make it so hot that wax melts, which makes it necessary to install a ventilating apparatus. "If it gets too cold, though, the eyes fall out," he said. "It's enough to break your heart." Mr. Schmidt likes the Lord & Taylor display and drops by every day or so for another look at it, but he remembers rather wistfully the old days, when mechanical Santas, el ves, and reindeer were in vogue for holiday windows. "Now you have to be grotesque or futuristic or have things go on and off," he said. "I'm of the realist school myself-not that it seems to do me much good." Mr. Schmidt works with a staff of fi ve, four of them members of his family. His son and son-in-law help mold the figures and his wife and daughter put on the hair and eyelashes. <eM y wife is more of a critic than an artist, but she sure is good on hair," Mr. Schmidt told us. Life in the Schmidt family is 15 full of variety, we gathered. For in- stance, Mr. Schmidt took up flying seven years ago, at the age of sIxty-one, and piled up forty solo hours before Pearl Harbor. He's something of an inventor and has just patented an improved ma- rine propeller, as well as something for the government that he doesn't feel at liberty to mention. Animating the breathing figure for Lord & Taylor was child's play for a man of this calibre -just a rnatter of a motor to push the chest out and springs to pull it in. What Mr. Schmidt would like to achieve is a figure that breathes and walks. He heard some years ago that å Swiss craftsman had done such a job and he started experimenting himself. "It wasn't feasible," he confessed mood- ily. "We had that thing pacing up and down, but it just didn't seem right. You can't get a natural walk, or at least I couldn't decide what a natural walk would be. I guess some scientific foundation will have to work it out." Raise AN obscure consequence of an act of r-\. Congress, effective May 1, 1943, which gave federal employees a cost- ,..::::':..:.l.. . .: '\ :. .... . ...:-;".: '.:..;. :. . rt ;./ /f '> \